In early May, a representative of Microsoft spoke at NYU's prestigious Stern Business School. He delivered an attack on open source software and it's adherents. He said it was 'bad for business' and suggested one need only witness the current dotcom meltdown to accept the folly of naive revenue models. The talk, widely reported and also webcast by the NYU Advanced Media Lab, caused a bit of a stir.

Richard M. Stallman, author of the GNU operating system, and the GPL open source license under which it is released, and the greatest propagator of free software on the planet, duly came to NYC to respond. I videotaped from the front row and, as well as the speech, got some very good shots of RMS's dance moves. Having done a bit of research I was aware that RMS would not permit himself to be transmitted in any propietarily restricted format. After the talk, I wandered to the back where NYU's media lab had been taping on a tripod set up, and casually enquired, in light of that what codec they intended to use.. they were dumbfounded - :0 But that is the paradox that Mr Stallman presents so well in the talk that 'freedom and cooperation' in the long term can only be achieved thru 'restriction and resistance' in the short..

Thus, anyway, this is a punkcast exclusive..

This is the audio only - encoded in the OGG VORBIS format - a player may be found here - these are big files - over 100MB in total. If you would prefer to pay $5 (inc P&P) for a copy on CDR - email orders@pinstand.com and ask for PUNKCAST#64.